Introduction and Episode Background

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 858

Guest [00:00:02] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking the donate button on the top right side of the page. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

John Dehlin [00:00:43] Okay. Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is January 17, 2018, and we are very, very excited for today's episode we have with us returning to Mormon Stories Podcast. First, we'll welcome back Jamie Hanis-Handy. Hey, Jamie, where are you joining us from?

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:01:09] South Lake, Texas.

John Dehlin [00:01:10] Thanks for joining us. We're excited to have you here.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:01:12] Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:01:12] We also have joining us back on Mormon Stories podcast, the wonderful Lindsay Hanson park, head of Sunstone and your polygamy podcast. Lindsay, thank you for joining us.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:01:23] Thank you for having me.

John Dehlin [00:01:25] Have you seen Greatest Showman yet?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:01:27] No, I haven't even seen Star wars yet.

John Dehlin [00:01:29] We got to work on that. Well, welcome. Thanks for joining us. We also have returning to Mormon Stories, Glenn Oslin. Some of you who are hardcore fans of Mormon Stories podcast will remember that the great Glenn Ostland once upon a time on an episode about divorce, but he is also now super famous and known as Glenn on Infants on Thrones. Glenn, welcome back to Mormon Stories Podcast.

Glenn Ostlund [00:01:59] Thanks, John.

John Dehlin [00:02:00] And then finally joining us again, back on Mormon Stories for her, who knows how many appearances we have, Dr. Gina Colvin. Gina is the host of a thoughtful faith podcast and she's awesome. Gina, welcome back.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:02:15] Thank you, John.

Gina Colvin [00:02:16] It's good to be back.

John Dehlin [00:02:17] All right, so this is gonna be. This is the type of podcast that's kind of hard to dive into. So I'm gonna give a little bit of history about this episode. Today's episode is about this concept called spiral dynamics. And I learned about spiral dynamics from a friend, a new friend of mine, who learned about it on a podcast called the Liturgists Podcast. And the liturgists, when they introduced this concept of spiral dynamics, they spent like 10 or 15 minutes setting it up. And they wondered themselves, once they did whether it would have made more sense just to dive into it. But having said all that, Gina, since you sort of study these frameworks and research them and teach them as part of what you do, do you mind just giving us a tiny bit of a setup for what, what we're doing here when we talk about these sorts of things and why it might be interesting or important.

Gina Colvin [00:03:15] I think spiral dynamics occurs in the family of theories about development, adult development. Spiral dynamics in particular deals with the growth of consciousness in any given society. Now I'm interested in it because I'm interested in faith development theory, which is called fdt, and ministry, which is the suggestion that adults aren't static, that we grow into other forms of consciousness. And spiral dynamics takes sort of a more agnostic approach. It's about. They track states of consciousness in any given society in any given time and suggest that it's spiral because we're always circling back. We're sort of moving, growing into, growing away from these forms of consciousness. But on the whole, spiral dynamics suggests that there is sort of a. There's a. There's a point at which societies get to. That can. That feels like the collective sort of dynamic that, that creates this fabric of feeling. Does that make sense?

John Dehlin [00:04:23] Yeah. Yeah. And if I had to just add my sort of blue collar cheeseburger's sort of justification for this, it would be that we're in this really interesting Mormon moment. We've just had President Thomas S. Monson die. We now have Russell M. Nelson ascending as prophet. We've been doing John.

Glenn Ostlund [00:04:45] When you said we had President Monson die, you didn't have anything to do with that, right?

John Dehlin [00:04:50] Well, no, I didn't.

Glenn Ostlund [00:04:52] Okay.

Gina Colvin [00:04:54] That's not a bad question.

John Dehlin [00:04:56] Thank you. Thank you for clarifying, Glenn.

Guest 2 [00:04:59] All right.

John Dehlin [00:05:01] But you know, a lot of us have been sort of trying to contribute in our various ways in the Mormon, progressive, Mormon, post, Mormon, Mormon scholarship, sort of communities for now well over a decade. Lindsay, when did I first meet you? You were blogging for FMH when we

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:05:21] first met, right, 10 years ago.

John Dehlin [00:05:23] Yeah, yeah, so. So we've been at this for a long time and I think it's worthwhile to be reflective of where we are, where the church is, where humanity is. This applies to politics, not just religion, not just faith development. This applies to all sorts of different arenas. But specifically today, I want to lay out for our listeners. I want us to lay out for our listeners this sort of framework and then allow it to have us be a bit self reflective, not only about where we are and where we want to go. And I'll just say, here's why I picked the people that I picked. Glenn is here because Glenn is super excited about this model. He's been thinking about the future of infants on thrones and where he wants to take it next and what he wants to do. And so I think Glenn's just always insightful and thoughtful and witty and fun. That's why I've got Glenn on Lindsay, you know, with her initiative at Sunstone. Lindsay, tell us what the theme was of Sunstone last summer.

Sunstone 2017 and the Many Ways to Mormon

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:06:25] So our overall theme is there's more than one way to Mormon. So we're trying to meet people where they're at in different schools of thought and different lifestyles and even, you know, extremes around the Mormon spectrum and get everyone in the same room and learn how to coexist and to share ideas.

John Dehlin [00:06:44] Yeah. And so in some ways, Lindsay, you've been sort of riding the spiral dynamics train, even if you haven't been aware of what it is yet. And maybe some of us are following some of your leadership in this regard. So that's why I wanted you on. I've already mentioned Gina. Now, Gina, you're changing the focus of a thoughtful faith. Do you want to just talk about that just a tiny bit?

Gina Colvin [00:07:05] Oh, I think, particularly in the field of human development and adult faith development, it tracks along really nicely with my work in ministry because it asks the question, how do we deal with people who are changing, whose consciousness are changing? That's a real pastoral, really important pastoral question. And James Fowler called, how do we cultivate environments of developmental expectation, which is to say, how do we hold people and honour their changing faith lives? Because it kind of. Because if you. If you are out of sync with the way in which that particular church community or whatever faith community is calibrating at, you consider deviant, which I think has happened to a lot of Mormons that they've been led to understand that their intuitive development, the growth of their consciousness, is something that is deviant and that has huge spiritual effects, I think.

John Dehlin [00:08:12] Absolutely. Can I add. Please go ahead and jump in. Yeah.

Glenn Ostlund [00:08:16] You said consciousness six times now, and I love it.

Gina Colvin [00:08:19] You're counting.

Glenn Ostlund [00:08:20] Yeah, because it's one of the things that John was saying. I'm interested in taking infants in a new direction. I've just been learning all this stuff, and consciousness is a big part of that. What do you mean when you say consciousness? Could you give us a definition that.

Gina Colvin [00:08:37] I suppose it's how we. I mean, we could talk at a soul level or an intellectual level, but there is sort of the way that we integrate new ways of experiencing the world and others. And, you know, I mean, we can talk about spiral dynamics. There's a particular consciousness which allows for us to feel justified in locking down and Protecting community. But what happens when, you know, there's usually a disruption or some kind of eruption that complicates that, that moves us into another way of seeing the world. So I suppose I'm using it interchangeably with the idea of worldview or like

Glenn Ostlund [00:09:15] an awareness or just. Yeah, like how you see things, what you're aware of, the meaning, the purpose of everything. That's all kind of lumped into consciousness.

Gina Colvin [00:09:25] I suppose that's the way I'm using it. I'm not sure if I'm using it correctly. But I mean, if you look at the idea of awakening is also a way of kind of consciousness development. And I'm not suggesting it's going anywhere, but just. I suppose there are many traditions. I have it in my Mori tradition that there is a way in which we begin to see different things and accommodate our lives and our thinking the way we are with the world.

Introduction to Spiral Dynamics

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:09:49] Cool.

Guest 2 [00:09:49] John, can I jump in, please?

John Dehlin [00:09:51] Lindsay, jump in.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:09:53] Just so to give some background, I think, on what we're talking about and what Gina is referring to, the spiral dynamics. I just wanted to give a little bit of background that I found helpful. So what is that personality test that everyone takes? And you get the color? I forget the name.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:10:08] Meyer Briggs.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:10:09] Myers Briggs. Yeah. And maybe it's because I'm a hipster without the good fashion sense, but like, that always bugged me. I'm like, I don't want to tell you my color because it doesn't feel quite right. I think I'm like a yellow blue or something. I can't remember. But there was this big trend in psychology in the 50s and 60s to sort of come up with ways to understand human behavior and worldview points and things like that. And the person who originally started pioneering this spiral dynamics was Claire Graves, who was a contemporary to Abraham Maslow, who did the, you know, the hierarchy of an Eve that we all know about. And they talked about this a lot. And it is said that Abraham Maslow said that Graves model spiral dynamics was far superior to his. But he never lived to publish his research. He died before he could do that. But what I like about this approach, unlike the Meyer Briggs stuff, which is fine, it's fine. But it doesn't label people as you're this. And this is the confines of how you're going to stay, and you're inherently assigned to these traits. Spiral dynamics is a way, is sort of the same approach, like Myers Briggs and all these things. But it says it's really complicated and it's really messy and People move from here, and they move here from this space to this space. And that's what I like about it, because that's what I found in my own life.

John Dehlin [00:11:36] Yeah, absolutely. And, Jamie, we have you on not only because you're brilliant, but because in some ways, I think you're trying to live this out because you. You are every bit of a progressive Mormon as any of us, and yet you're still active and, you know, engaging in the church. Right. And so I'm sure these themes connected with you. Is that true?

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:11:56] It is. You know, what I liked about it is, I think it's the growth mindset idea that we didn't come with a fixed ability, we didn't come with a fixed status. That as we learn and grow and develop, that you can look at this framework both at an individual context and then as part of a larger community and recognize that one position is not necessarily morally superior than another position. And it provides that empathy and grace that you can have for someone that may not be seeing the world the same as you. And you can step back and say, do you know, my experiences and my culture and my life have led me to a different state right now. And I can understand the position that you're in, and I can respect that position and not feel like your position makes you stupid, which I think is human nature, that we want to label each other and we want to consider where we are always to be the better or the preferred path. You know, that's one thing that I have found is really difficult as you take the time to be thoughtful and reflective on how to pattern and make conscious decisions in your life about what you're going to do, that everyone is pulling for you to choose their path. They want that verification by if you do what they're doing, then they feel justified and feel better about their decision. You know, it's a recruitment. The more people that decide to behave how you behave, the better they feel. So everybody who went to a certain college wants everybody around them to choose that college. You feel better about your choice. And this sort of. It just provides that framework. I think it's far greater than the hierarchy of needs, which I've always liked, but because it allows for movement forwards and backwards, it's not static. It's constantly changing. And the biggest thing is that when you can say, okay, I'm kind of feeling like I'm right here, you can see steps that you can take to move to the next level, or you can see steps to help your community, or you can see things It's a really positive mindset for us to interpret our Mormon cultural experiences with regular world experiences.

John Dehlin [00:14:03] Love it. Go ahead.

Glenn Ostlund [00:14:05] Yeah. The other thing about that, Jamie,

Guest 2 [00:14:10] when

Glenn Ostlund [00:14:10] you move from one to another, you don't lose where you were. Yeah, that's always still a part of it. I think maybe later on we'll get into this a little bit more, but I think the non judgmental part of saying this isn't any better than that. I want to challenge that a little bit, but maybe we can do that later.

John Dehlin [00:14:30] Let's do it. So let's dive in. So I'll get. This is all great now that I said we want to avoid doing a meta conversation about the conversation. We just spent about 15 minutes doing that. Let's dive in. So I'm going to give a really crude and basic attempt at explaining Spiral Dynamics. And it begins, first of all, Mormon stories.

Glenn Ostlund [00:14:52] I can't wait.

John Dehlin [00:14:52] I know, I know. And we've already kind of goofed up because we've mentioned levels and Spiral Dynamics is explicitly set up. Unlike Fowler's Stages of Faith, that has numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, for example, spiral Dynamics avoids using numbers, but instead it uses colors. And then each color represents what Spiral Dynamics calls a V meme. Now, don't let that annoy you or freak you out. Basically, a V meme is technically referred to as a values container, but just think of it as a model or a way, a different way that people understand the world. It's a container for memes. It's a worldview. And it's sort of a worldview that in some ways can limit the boundaries of your cognition. That's the way that V memes were defined. And we're going to just jump right into it. But when we talk about V memes, just think of it as a worldview. Basically, there are six or seven different colors that are represented within Spiral Dynamics. And we're going to talk about each one briefly. Here we go. By the way, we will put a link to a graphic or a visual that will help you guys see and understand these different. These different V memes. And you can, all of you who are panelists right now, if you want to go to the Liturgist podcast on Spiral Dynamics and pull up the images that they have there, that can sort of be a framework from which we try to talk about this stuff. So let's dive into it. The first color that Spiral Dynamics talks about is beige. And when you think about beige as a worldviewer, as a V meme, think of it as we've already talked about very much on the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's a worldview around survival. Think of it as you being sort of infantile or primitive in your worldview. It's where you live your life almost in an animalistic way where you respond to stimulus. I think Mormonism might refer to this as the natural man. It's basically responding and making choices in your life based on stimulus or not making choices, but instead just reacting. A way that the literature talked about this was if someone points a gun to you, you go beige, which is your lizard brain, it's your amygdala, it's your reptilian brain. And it's sort of living on the edge of survival. So, you know, probably we don't know many people who live in beige. Maybe a homeless person. That's the first thing that came to my mind. Somebody who's just living to survive. But that's beige. And one thing we're going to find out is these V means rotate between individualistic and sort of group based or communal. But do any of you have something you want to say about beige? Or is it just sort of like Fowler stage one, where everybody just ignores it and moves on?

Gina Colvin [00:18:06] Oh, I have a question.

John Dehlin [00:18:07] Yes?

Gina Colvin [00:18:08] Do you think we have sex in beige?

John Dehlin [00:18:10] Yeah, we have lots of sex in beige, right? Yeah, lots of unmoderated, unregulated sex.

Glenn Ostlund [00:18:17] Explain what you mean by that, Gina.

Gina Colvin [00:18:19] Well, what I mean is that if this is sort of like beige is a state of nature, it's quite. It's quite embodied, you know, and there's not a rational brain that really goes on with sex, you know, I mean, maybe there is for some people, but it's just not for me, you know? Tmi. No, I'm just thinking.

Glenn Ostlund [00:18:37] Let's say that it doesn't help.

Gina Colvin [00:18:39] No, it doesn't. I go beige. It's like, you know, just give it to me, baby. You know, there's no rationality there.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:18:45] But I think we're still doing what, what John was worried. Like we're acting like this is some low base. And my understanding of this dynamic is this is just a phase or gosh, like our human, you know, constructions aren't sufficient enough to sort of articulate what they're trying to communicate with this model. But it's not like it's a lower level. And so, Gina, to answer your question, I don't you think sex could fit into a lot of these things depending. Depending where you're at in your development I think what the beige would cover is your physical response, your physical desire, hormones, just the, like the natural tendencies which are a part of sex but don't have to be all of sex.

Gina Colvin [00:19:29] Well, this is true. Yes. I'm just talking about my sex, which is like a definitely beige.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:19:34] A bit of red too, I think. Again, I think when if we're trying to always say, oh, that this is lower, I think. I think I have beige moments every day, all day with my kids, with my spouse, with myself. You know, I mean, before I got on the podcast, I set out dinner and food or we were gonna have a beige revolution occurring at my house with like, you know, these needs and this basic. Forget over that we're humans and we need to eat. And we're humans and we experience. And we're humans and we experience. Baseline don't go away. I mean, every day I spend my time meeting the beige needs of my family and myself.

John Dehlin [00:20:22] Absolutely. Yeah. We can't escape our amygdala. We can't escape our reptilian brain. It's there for a reason and it's sort of where we begin. It's where we begin. What's that? Did someone say something?

Glenn Ostlund [00:20:38] I don't know, but I've got some things to say. I think if we're saying that beige are those basic needs, and we also talked about consciousness or awareness, that beige would be like the first things that we're aware of in the world that we need. And so framing it as awareness, that that awareness doesn't go away as our awareness expands into other places, that's still at the core. So that's still. Why in sex or in food or these basic needs, we still can be in this beige space. I was trying to think of a church analogy as I was listening to these things, and I thought maybe as a child, one year old, two year old, attending nursery, when you were in nursery, maybe nursery is a more.

John Dehlin [00:21:27] Yeah, Cheerios. It's Cheerios.

Glenn Ostlund [00:21:31] That you're just there. It's like the kids are kind of doing their own thing. They're just buying time. And the parents, they just want to get the kids out of their hair so that they can go on with church meetings. And, you know, so that's. That's like a beige space in the church, in Leah's chapel.

John Dehlin [00:21:47] It's cups of juice and Cheerios and, you know, playing with toys.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:21:55] Is that too loud?

John Dehlin [00:21:55] That's better. That's great.

Guest 2 [00:21:57] Okay.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:21:58] I think the problem that I have, though, with the way that we're still talking about this is. We're talking about it like Cheerios and grape juice, as if it's a negative thing.

John Dehlin [00:22:09] That's right. It's not negative.

Glenn Ostlund [00:22:10] I think that's you, Lindsay.

Guest 2 [00:22:13] I'm just projecting.

Glenn Ostlund [00:22:14] I like Cheerios just fine.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:22:16] Yeah, no, I think so. I'm reminded now that Gina's got me thinking about sex. Thank you, Gina. Lisa Butterworth, who started Feminist Mormon Housewives, she gives out sex advice from time to time. And one of the best advice that I've ever heard her give about sex is, if you're having problems with sex, just turn your animal brain on. Just turn your animal brain on. Just go for it. And to me, that's what I think about. And it. Honestly, it's almost the closest thing to mindfulness that I can experience. This idea of, like, just let your animal brain take over, be in the moment. Think about it for a minute. So I don't see it as, like, a underdeveloped way to be.

John Dehlin [00:22:57] It's a part of all of us.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:22:59] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:23:00] Yep. Very good. Okay, so we've talked about beige. Now let's go to the next V meme, which is purple. And when you think about now, remember, these alternate between an individualistic and sort of a communal worldview. So purple. Think about now, this next stage in human consciousness where instead of sort of being a lone caveman walking on the prairie, you are now grouping together with other people into tribes. And so purple represents our tribal identity. We hunt. We. You know, we see, we grow crops, we look at the world and natural disasters and wars and famine around us, and we try and make sense of it. And we know that there are these unseen forces out there that have influences in our lives, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, the seasons, etc. And we want to make sense of it. And the liturgist said that the person with the most power in the purple sort of v meme is the shaman. And the shaman is the one who can look at the forces, the unseen forces in the universe and. And can make sense of them and tell the tribe what's going on. Why is there a flood? Why is there famine? What. You know, what. What's coming around the corner? And so, again, purple is very tribal. You can also think of purple as, like, college football. So, you know, just why are you a Notre Dame fan or a Florida State fan or, Gina, give us a New Zealand rugby team.

Beige and Purple: Survival and Tribal Belonging

Gina Colvin [00:24:54] Oh, Crusaders.

John Dehlin [00:24:55] Crusaders. Like, why are you a crusader? Because you're a crusader.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:24:59] Right?

John Dehlin [00:24:59] It's your tribe. Right. And it's still very primal but it's just all about identity and tribalism. So it's sort of the next step beyond beige. Now that's purple. And now I want to invite anyone to jump in if they want to add anything about purple. Glenn, why don't you start? Oh, Jamie. Jamie, you go then, Glenn.

Glenn Ostlund [00:25:19] I'd like to start by calling on Jamie.

John Dehlin [00:25:21] Okay.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:25:23] You know, I think we could summarize this in our religious context as the God of the gaps, and, you know, the shaman or the person that was seeing that almost as the person with the greatest imagination who could explain the unexplainable. You know, when you're not sure what is to fill that space or to explain to the group, you know, you're a storyteller. You're crafting a narrative. This is where myth originates. And so this idea that myth and humanity have a very long history going back on how we explain things.

John Dehlin [00:25:54] Love it. Glenn, should we talk about myth? No.

Glenn Ostlund [00:25:58] Done enough of that lately. I think one of the things that I liked about that liturgist podcast, the way that they explained in Spiral Dynamics, and Gina referenced it earlier when she was talking about it, is that each one of these colors is a response to the previous one. So it's like in beige, there are pros, there are cons. And when you're all about the pros, it's great. When you start becoming aware of the cons, then you've got to adapt. And so the adaptation of that puts you from the beige to what they're calling purple. And so if we look at it that way and we say there's this individualistic, communal, like, tug of war, push and pull going between it, once the individual realizes I'm getting my individual needs met, but I don't have that social connection, and I need that social connection that. That's when you get into the purple, and there's all kinds of benefits that go with that, but then you start becoming aware of the cons, and it moves it. And so it's like that's kind of a framework that moves you through all of these things. And again, it doesn't erase where you were before.

John Dehlin [00:27:07] It just adds to what it adds to.

Glenn Ostlund [00:27:10] So, yeah, I think having recently read the book Sapiens and then Homo Deus, you know, this idea of mythology and just fictions that is able to come from language, as we're communicating with each other and we have some kind of a story or shared values that are able to bind us together as a group or a tribe. It's a really powerful instinct. And If Spiral Dynamics is right, it's the initial. It's the first time humans are really experiencing the power of being in a group. And that reminds me, it seems also like with Spiral Dynamics, there's two different conversations going on in that liturgist podcast. There's the one about how humanity developed over history, but then there's also, like, your personal journey through the colors as well. And there's kind of a parallel between the two of them. So that might get mixed up as we're talking about it, but that's where I see purple is very powerful. It binds people together in kind of the same. I don't want to say primitive, because that seems like it's pejorative, but these very initial, important ways to who we are.

John Dehlin [00:28:25] Yeah, we are a lone animal, is a dead animal, as they say, tribal. We are evolutionarily evolved, if you buy into evolution, to be tribal creatures. And so this not only goes back tens of thousands of years, if not more, it's also still very much with us. Lindsay, what do you want to say about purple?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:28:45] I just. I feel like this has a lot to do with my Mormonism. I mean, this sort of magical thinking and myths and blood. Blood oaths and all of that stuff really is in this area. And for me, growing up, my faith was really superstitious, actually. You know, and that comes along with prosperity gospel. If you are righteous, then you'll be blessed. And so that is how you choose to look at the world, that if you do A, B, and C, then D will happen, and you get superstitious about it. And so I think that a lot of Mormons can understand and really identify with this color. At least. At least I did, because there's a lot of magical thinking involved.

Guest [00:29:28] Love it.

John Dehlin [00:29:29] All right, Gina, what do you want to add?

Gina Colvin [00:29:32] Oh, I think purple is sort of the color of the Old Testament, sort of a sacred text of the purple. And if you're talking spiral dynamics, many of us are in blue reading the purple text, or even orange or even green.

John Dehlin [00:29:50] They don't know what we mean by blue, but. Yes.

Gina Colvin [00:29:52] Yeah, yeah. So just to kind of own that. And classically, that's. The Old Testament is a sacred text of the purple.

John Dehlin [00:30:01] Yeah. Meaning that it's. I mean, what. I think what many people view the Old Testament now is a bunch of tribal justifications for things that happened that were attributed to God. Right.

Gina Colvin [00:30:13] Yeah. Well, I mean, you've got the shaman there who's taking care of the narratives. You've got tribal politics and people trying to explain Things using mythology and story and narratives. I think, you know, that's what it is.

John Dehlin [00:30:25] Yeah.

Guest 2 [00:30:26] I'll give you one really quick, please. Yeah, and.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:30:29] Sorry, I just took off my mic

Guest 2 [00:30:31] because it's giving me problems. But this is one that I grew up thinking that if you break the Sabbath on Sunday or if, like someone gets in a car accident on Sunday, it's because they weren't in church. It's that kind of rationale. Does that fit? Do you think that fits?

John Dehlin [00:30:47] Yeah, sure. My sister, someone very close to me once said, I'm not gonna stop paying tithing because I'm worried what will happen if I don't. You know, it's like. It's like sacrifice the virgin to the Aztec sun God, right? Yeah. And lots of other things too. It's war. It's a certain type of war. It's a certain type of tribal clash. And it's also a social structure. But that's. That's purple.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:31:14] I think it's. I think it's important to recognize that, you know, this purple need to belong is so powerful and it is almost used and abused by many groups to keep people from moving beyond, you know, and so as Glenn was saying, you know, there's pros and cons to each level. I think one of the big cons to this level is that you're forced to put tribe above individual. You know, you're forced to make decisions that might go against your moral judgment. I think we can say, you know, pretty clearly the Old Testament shows many examples where somebody puts tribal benefit and loyalty above moral on individual decision making. And we still try and justify that. When I think the appropriate answer is there is no place for that in a. In a. As you move up this spiral dynamics. And I think the big one, that's

Glenn Ostlund [00:32:12] a really good point because you have to surrender part of your own power, your individualism, for the group in purple. And so to go to my church analogy, if beige is nursery, then purple is primary. When you start being put into these classes and you have to, like, interact with the entire primary, but then also your class. And for me personally, I had so many clashes with primary teachers who were trying to keep me in line, and I didn't want to stay. I didn't want to surrender that individualism or that power just to be part of this group. It was something, even when I was in primary, I had hard time with. So that's kind of. In my made up analogy of the church, I see primary as being the purple place. So the primary colors are 1, 2, 3, purple, purple and purple. That's it.

John Dehlin [00:33:10] Now, Lindsay, this is the part where you tell Glenn that him comparing purple to primary is insulting to purple.

Guest 2 [00:33:17] I was thinking it, but I didn't want to say. I understand.

John Dehlin [00:33:22] I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

Guest 2 [00:33:24] We're trying to put words to this idea. But when I hear you say that, Glenn, it feels like you're placing a judgment on the other. That's all. Like we're graduating, you know, and we are.

Glenn Ostlund [00:33:39] I wasn't thinking that, but I was thinking as you're like, as your awareness is expanding.

John Dehlin [00:33:45] I was kidding.

Glenn Ostlund [00:33:46] Yeah.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:33:46] Okay.

Glenn Ostlund [00:33:47] You started something, John. Way to go. Way to go.

Red: Power, Ego, and Individualism

John Dehlin [00:33:50] Okay, the next V meme is red. Red is again moving back to the individualistic. So purple was sort of communal, community based. Now we're going back to red. And red is the one I have the least amount on. Think of red as being a state of ego where strength is of primacy. Think about dictators, think about people who are all about, I would almost say historically masculine or patriarchal sort of forms of power. Think Mussolini. Brigham Young. Brigham Young, absolutely. It's just, it's macho male, dictatorial sort of ego. And liturgist is really careful to say that it's. It's not bad to have ego. You know, ego for me as a psychologist is just kind of self awareness and an ability to contemplate your place in the world relative to things around you. And of course there's still this element of the fittest survive and the sort of alpha male ascends to the top. But it's a real primacy on ego and strength. So that doesn't feel like I gave red justice, but. Amy, you're waving at me.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:35:16] I feel like as the current parent to three teenagers that this is teenagerhood. You know, as a, as you know, 0 to 10 year olds, they welcomely participate in the family dynamic. They are willing to come to family dinner. I'm in the fourth family fund stage of parenting where they are reasserting their individual needs that we as a family aren't necessarily meeting those for them. And they're learning to branch out as far as them. They're learning to establish boundaries and maintain new relationships and they're forming additional tribes. And as they do that, their need to be an individual starts to soar. It's that every teenager is the most selfish person you've ever met. And recognizing that I was that selfish teenager. We all have been through that phase as you reassert yourself into the tribe and say hey, actually I don't want to have this for dinner tonight or I want to have a later curfew or I want to do this. And it is about becoming an individual and becoming your own. And it's really, you know, as far as growth and development, this is a really important stage. I think a lot of people in the church never learn to assert themselves as individuals. They feel the pressure from the tribe so significantly that that ability to speak up and have an individual voice and say, you know, this is not right. This is not something I want to do. On just the previous podcast I was on, you know, we've talked about helping our kids establish, you know, do you have any interest in even meeting with the bishop? You know, this is not a rite of passage we're going to enforce on you as part of the tribe. This is something that, you know, you feel like this is something you want or something you're going, going for or something you would like to establish this sort of relationship, a pastoral relationship, is that something you want to do and you have every right and we respect it if you say, no, this isn't what you want to do. And I think this is where participation in any church, not just ours, but in any church, it sets apart from others and it allows people to suddenly start looking at you from the outside like, why are you not just conforming? And so I feel like, you know, a lot of people look at me and probably think I'm just in this teenager stage of faith development. Right. Because I'm continually asserting my own individual rights and establishing that I, I can do that. I have that power within me and I can establish boundaries and I spend a lot of time doing it.

John Dehlin [00:37:41] Love it. Gina, talk to us about red.

Gina Colvin [00:37:45] I'm observing some red activity going on in my house at the moment with two 11 year old and two 13 year old boys. And it's bringing the red out in me. So I'm just sort of watching if somebody clutches an arm and the other one clutches a hockey stick. Yeah. So it's pretty much a big pissing competition, really. You know, I think, I think I agree with Jamie. It's about. The exercise of ego and learning the boundaries of that. So there's some good things, but there may not be some good things about if I jump up. That's because there's red stuff going on.

John Dehlin [00:38:21] Yeah. And sometimes we tend to think of ego as a bad thing, like, oh, he's got so much of an ego. But that's not what we mean when we say the word. Ego, it's just sort of a self concept individuated from the tribe. But it also doesn't mean not being a part of a tribe. It's basically existing in a tribe, but then developing your own sense of self independent of and then still in the context of the tribe, does that make sense? So don't think ego bad. And there was a really good quote in the liturgist podcast that said you have to have an ego to then transcend your ego. So it requires first that you develop it. Lindsay, talk to us about red, because you have red hair. Of all the people that should be talking to us about red, it's you.

Guest 2 [00:39:02] It's not real.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:39:05] Okay, so it's real.

John Dehlin [00:39:06] It's true. It's true. It's more real.

Guest 2 [00:39:09] Thank you, John. So I've been reading Joseph Campbell a lot lately, so I've got like the hero's journey on the brain. But when I think about this in this framework, I think about an individual who comes as an animal, as a human comes as an animal, and then we start looking around and we say, well, why are things the way that they are? And in the sort of purple world, it would be like, you know, the tribe around you tells you these magical stories of this is why things are the way they are. This is how the world works. But your questions might not be satisfied or you need a deeper understanding. And so red, to me is a response to, like, the order and the sort of structure that purple creates, but it doesn't quite fit. And so sometimes when that happens, at least with me, I experienced when the stories and the examples we'll take polygamy, for example, they were bothering me and their usual answers weren't sufficient anymore. I didn't have the tools or the skill set or the understanding to come to the complexity of the practice that I do now after years and years of research, what I did have was a lot of anger. I had a lot of angst. And so how I expressed this disconnect that I was feeling, that these answers were not sufficient was rage, was protests, was tantrums, was things like that. And so for me, red is sort of that way to exert your individuality, like Jamie was talking about, but probably in a way that isn't helpful in community. So it's the law of the jungle, like they always say, and it's survival of the fittest. So that's how I contextualize red.

John Dehlin [00:40:44] I love it. Now, Glenn, before we bring you on, I want to check in with our commenters because we've got a few fun comments. Alan writes. Sure appreciate you, Lindsay. So, Lindsay, Alan wants to give a shout out to you, so say hi to Alan. Daniel, who's someone who I've gotten to know recently, he says red equals cult of personality. He says, I think a charismatic leader would fit the bill, not just raw testosterone. That's a great contribution from Daniel. And then Kendra writes, all my favorite people live.

Guest [00:41:15] Love it.

John Dehlin [00:41:16] And then, Glenn, the reason I cut you off is because Kendra also writes, it's weird to see Glenn live. I've been listening to him on his podcast for a while now. I never had a face to put to his voice. Ha ha, funny. Not his face. Just the thought. So you can respond to Kendra and to Red if you want. Now, Glenn. Oh, you muted yourself. Try again. Glenn, unmute yourself, then talk.

Glenn Ostlund [00:41:40] Oh, okay. See, I thought I was on mute because there's a siren coming behind me and I was trying to.

John Dehlin [00:41:44] No problem, no problem.

Glenn Ostlund [00:41:46] Hi, Kendra. I said, hi, Kendra. So if you know, I've been developing this nursery to primary thing, thinking about my own life, my own experience. After primary, I went into young men's and that meant for me going into the scouting program. And one of the most horrifying things I ever had to experience was my first scout outing when the older scouts were saying, okay, now it's time to initiate the younger scouts. This is a very red activity of recognizing. We've all been in a group. There's benefits to the group in purple, but there's some disadvantages. You have to surrender your power. Dammit. Can I say dammit on Mormon Stewards? I want my. I want my power back. And so red is like, I'm going to assert myself. So we had these older scouts that kind of terrorized the younger scouts. And can I give an example of what they said they were going to do?

John Dehlin [00:42:42] Yeah, please.

Glenn Ostlund [00:42:44] Now, they didn't do this. I was really glad, but it scared us. They said, we're going to take you to a campfire. We're going to take a hot dog. We're going to cook it over campfire. You're gonna have to pull down your pants. We're gonna stick the hot dog between your butt cheeks. You're gonna have to run from the fire to the tree and back to the fire. And if the hot dog falls out, you have to eat it. I was 12 years old.

John Dehlin [00:43:10] That's real.

Glenn Ostlund [00:43:11] I still remember that. That scared me. But that's very red. I think from Spiral Dynamics, an example of the redness as awareness is expanding and you're saying, no, I've got a. I've got to get my power where I can. Here are some weak newbies that I can take advantage of. And yeah, so that's what I have to say about red.

John Dehlin [00:43:33] All right, Glenn, I think I have a sense that you're using us for therapy.

Glenn Ostlund [00:43:39] Oh, I've been podcasting for therapy for nine years now. I think I've been using all of you for therapy.

John Dehlin [00:43:47] Jennifer asks, what are we talking about? Jennifer joined us late. Jennifer, we're talking about spiral dynamics. Daniel was kind enough to share a visual with you all in the Facebook Live feed. But it's these different sort of phases of development of human consciousness. And so far we have talked about a few. We've talked about beige, purple, and red, and everybody's given great contributions. Michelle writes, ego and arrogance are not the same thing. And that's a very succinct and thoughtful way to put it. Michelle. All right, so we've talked about red. Now it is time to move on to where the rubber's really going to start meeting the road. And that is we're going to talk about blue. Blue represents, you could say, religion. There's a sacred text in blue that is supposed to be the source of all truth in blue, in the worldview of blue, because again, we're moving from an individualistic to a more communal paradigm in the religious world. In the blue world, there's a single cause, there's a single reason to live, there's a single God, and there are new rules. And these rules that God gives when he sends Moses down with the Ten Commandments, although that is Old Testament. But when he sends Christ to give the new law, the laws are put down. And these laws provide orders, they provide stability. They keep Boy Scouts from forcing Glenn to run around with a hot dog between his butt cheeks. Basically, it protects the weak, not to say Glenn is weak. And it helps people, motivates people to strive towards developing their character. And one of its strengths is it helps to nurture when it's acting in its best moral character and fiber of its participants. It's very collectivist. And in many instances, I think the liturgist podcast said, it sort of jives well with capitalism and democracy. So it basically represents sort of 1980s America, which the religious right and religion and democracy, etc. Now, why don't we start this time with Lindsay. What would you like to add as we discuss blue?

Blue: Order, Rules, and Institutional Religion

Guest 2 [00:46:18] Well, you are talking about it in the framework of religion, which I think is fair, but I also think that this is just human nature in society. Because what we're talking about is it needs to keep people safe. We need these black and white rules. We need law and justice, good and evil. And, you know, feminist theory. We're always talking about this sort of angel and whore dynamic that women are placed under because it's. Humans want to make it easy, we want to make it black or white. We want to make people villains or heroes. And so that certainly shows up in religion. But I also think that that is just. I think it's a cancer society. I mean, like you said, it's meant to keep people safe because it's an easy way to do it in a collectivist, you know, society. But it is very incomplete.

Glenn Ostlund [00:47:07] See, Lindsay, when you say cancer of society, I get the feeling that you're kind of being pejorative about it.

Guest 2 [00:47:15] I don't know about you, but when I went to church, we had that at snack time.

John Dehlin [00:47:19] Okay.

Glenn Ostlund [00:47:19] Cancer.

Guest 2 [00:47:20] Cancer snack time. Yeah. And grape juice. Great.

John Dehlin [00:47:23] There's always going to be a running gag. You can't have a podcast without a running gag. I love it. Gina, what do you want to share about blue? Do you like blue? What are your feelings about blue, Gina?

Gina Colvin [00:47:37] Well, you know, I have an interesting relationship with blue, because what you're talking about is white, currently blue being controlled by white patriarchal colonialists, Western colonialism. And blue is always going to be that domain of control, institutional and social control, whoever controls it, whether or not you're a fascist or communist. You know, it's reasonably arbitrary, but, you know, I agree that it's a. It's a domain of stability, but because it is, it doesn't have very many movable parts to it, it's always going to trip over itself and produce people who are. Who are going to retreat to the edges to move more flexibility into that system. I think very much the LDS Church is a blue church. I think we have an exilic culture which is going out to the margins of the blue church and speaking. And I think that's a prophetic culture in many respects. When you look at the prophetic tradition, what has happened? And we can talk about Walter Brueggemann and this understanding of. And his understanding of a royal consciousness, which is empire, which is the order of the day, which rests, which promises a kind of fallacious or pretense of stability that people are really deeply attracted to. And the role of the prophetic is to speak into the core and the source of that power and to upset it and create an eruption. So, yeah, Blue is always with us.

John Dehlin [00:49:14] And I would say that maybe the focus for a thoughtful faith last year, 2017, was maybe to talk about the challenges of the blueness of Mormonism. Is that fair to say?

Gina Colvin [00:49:25] Yes, yes.

John Dehlin [00:49:26] Where it falls short, right?

Gina Colvin [00:49:28] Yeah. Because it's easy to, it's easy to do that, it's easy to feel red. And I think a lot of my podcasts, some of my podcasts have been in the kind of like red thing, like bastards sort of stuff in response to this blueness.

John Dehlin [00:49:44] Yeah, because the blueness has some disadvantages. It's not great at all. Ways moving to the needs, responding to the needs of people on the margins. Right.

Gina Colvin [00:49:58] Well, blue is self serving and I think if you want to put it in a religious context, blue generally idolizes itself and idolizes those and rewards those who reproduce the system. And there's always going to be some tension with that.

John Dehlin [00:50:17] And authority kind of reigns supreme in blue. Is that fair to say?

Gina Colvin [00:50:21] Yeah. And authority usually congests or like it starts, it's attracted to its own, so it doesn't, it doesn't accept pluralism and it doesn't accept critique either because it's. And it just sort of beads down with its own, you know, sense of authority.

John Dehlin [00:50:42] But again, it provides order, it provides structure, it's efficient in many instances and it can become this well oiled machine. Jamie, talk to us about blue. Jamie.

Mormonism Through the Blue Lens

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:50:53] So whereas the previous color that was about tribe, you know, it's kind of just the tribe that you were dropped into. This is a tribe of, that we want to claim is of your own choosing, that this is you. You've selected this because you agree with the greater good that they're trying to provide. And, and you've returned back to now working as a group towards that one. And so you have to really lose yourself again because now the greater good that you. And this is their big hook, right. That you chose this greater good, you're now willing to sacrifice self for this greater good that you chose. And I think that's really kind of where, you know, our Mormon upbringing, we say things like, you know, this eight year old chose to be baptized and that's why he has to be committed or she has to be committed to this greater good. I think again, the con is, and the thing that pushes and propels people out of this is the reality that there are factors beyond our circumstances about why we chose this as far as culturally and on a much bigger picture individually, we choose lots of things. We choose the college we're going to attend we choose the sports, athletic team, we're going to root for. There's a lot of things on the individual level, but culturally, I think, you know, the big con is realizing, well, maybe there wasn't quite as much choice in this. I've inherited. And there's some. There's definitely some inherent problems at this level, even though the goal may be a worthy goal, you know, even. But do the ends justify the means? And I think that's where you start to question when you're in the blue, there are definite costs to some of the greater goals that institutions are working towards, and you start to see the costs. And like you said, the people on the margins, the people who may not as easily conform, and the real question of choice and autonomy.

John Dehlin [00:52:39] I love it. And, Glenn, before we bring you in, I just want to emphasize. I think we can't emphasize enough that one of the central components of blue is that there's a predominant single true narrative that everybody sort of needs to sort of embrace, instead of it being lots of different truths, something sort of relativistic. There's one plan, there's one set of scripture, there's one interpretation, there's one set of authoritative leadership, and you get on the bus, or you get run over by the bus. Glenn, what would you add?

Glenn Ostlund [00:53:13] Well, I think picking up on that, Gina mentioned when we were talking about purple, that the Bible is a purple text. And when she said that, I was kind of like, yes, but it's also a blue text. And so she said the Old Testament.

John Dehlin [00:53:30] She said the Old Testament's a purple text.

Glenn Ostlund [00:53:33] All right, the Old Testament. So what makes it purple? Well, what makes it purple is that these were the initial myths that these tribes were telling themselves to create the group unity, all of this stuff. What happens when it becomes blue? Well, from purple, you recognize, oh, I'm sacrificing my power. So you go a little bit red. Here's how you can get some power. Here's how you can do it as an individual. You go from red to blue.

Guest 2 [00:54:00] Here's how.

Glenn Ostlund [00:54:00] Here's how we can get power as a group, as a hierarchy, while still protecting everybody and doing all those things. And it's taking those sacred narratives that developed in that purple stage and codifying them, canonizing them, having that be the rules that set up that govern this hierarchy, the power structures, all of that. So I think that's the connection between the purple and the. And the blue there in my growing up in the church analogy. And I don't mean anything pejorative by this Lindsey at all. But I see the preemptive right there. The next stage is going on a mission, and the mission is an incredibly blue place. It's, you know, when there's just so much that we've talked about as blue, that's evidence in the mission field how you really do sacrifice your individuality for the group. White shirts, ties, name tags, you know, what are you doing every single day? And I'm just talking about the guys with the white shirts and the ties. I'm sorry about that. But at any rate, I'm talking about my experience. So I see that as being very blue. And, you know, with this group and with this podcast, it's interesting to listen to the conversation about blue because we're all down on blue. We've all had bad experiences in blue. But actually blue is probably one of the most important V memes for people in the world. And, you know, we could have the discussion, is religion net negative or net positive? That's a blue discussion. What are the benefits that people get in feeling a sense of meaning, feeling a sense of purpose in their life? Why is it that we get so frustrated with teaching tbm, Family and friends that can't see the things that we see? They can't see the cons of being in a blue V meme because the pros are so strong in their life and they just that their awareness hasn't creeped over into that cons thing where it actually means something to them like it meant to us. And then we couldn't abide it anymore. We had to do something else. So that's where I see with blue. And I don't want to be because I'm aspiring to a different beaming that we'll talk about later that sees the value in all of the V memes and tries to do that. So I think we're talking about the value of blue. We all experienced it. We all have family and friends who are experiencing it now. And that's all I gotta say.

John Dehlin [00:56:34] I'm gonna add a comment from Daniel. Daniel writes in blue. The sacred texts aren't limited to things like Hebrew scripture, New Testament, Quran. Those texts usually are very closely associated with. With the charismatic leader of Red. They are sacred texts, but they're not all. I think the LDS. Oh, this is really good. I think the LDS Handbook of Instructions, the UN's Declaration of Human Rights and corporate mission statements, and maybe even the Republican or Democratic platform to take it to a political sort of thing should be seen on this level. It's basically bureaucratizing and. Oh, sorry, I'm. I'm not finishing Daniel's quote. He says either way, violation of the text earns the wrath of the hierarchy within the system. I love that. Daniel, I hope you contribute more. I just want to add. I forgot what I was about to add. Somebody bail me out while I'm trying to think about what I was going to add.

Guest 2 [00:57:29] Jamie, I was just going to say something about.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:57:31] Oh, sorry.

John Dehlin [00:57:32] Yeah, Lindsay.

Guest 2 [00:57:33] Then, Jamie, just to tie in, a topic we were talking about earlier is I have seen and I don't like to diagnose anyone, but when we're talking about this, I keep thinking of Elder Oaks. I feel like he is such a blue character. For me, at least that's what he represents in the church. It's very black and white. It's very legalistic. It's very simple. We have these rules and this is what it is. And if we, if I, I feel like if I were to go to Oaks with a very complicated problem would get some blue in return. Like, you know, forget all of these colors. It's.

John Dehlin [00:58:09] This is the policy. And almost with the November policy, it was like, wait, what do we have in the rule book? We've got that policy for polygamists, kids. Let's just apply that policy to this new thing. It's almost legalistic and it's almost bureaucratic in nature. Jamie, what did you want to add? And then I remembered. You guys stalled for me long enough to remember what I was going to say. Jamie, what are you going to say?

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:58:33] I think as people get frustrated with

Glenn Ostlund [00:58:35] blue,

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:58:38] interesting is rather than transcending, they just want to create a new blue. And, you know, that's a big frustration to me is that, you know, you look at some of the alternatives out there. I don't want to go to another blue where there's another blue text and another blue leader with another blue thing for me to disagree with so that I can then create another blue thing with another blue leader with another blue text. And so there ends up being so many blues and each one saying they're the right blue. And you know, for me, I think that's the biggest thing. Like I have a blue in my life. I don't need any more. I don't want to recreate this. Like, I really want to somehow build upon and find something better. I'm not looking for. And you know, we get ex Mormon or post Mormon circles, get criticized for recreating a just a new Mormonism. Right. It tends to be very male dominated. It tends to still be patriarchal. It tends to not value other voices. It tends to still be very American. It tends to still like we aren't necessarily transcending any of the problems that we see in blue. We're just picking and choosing the things we have and then making it good for us. The individual. Again, love it.

John Dehlin [00:59:43] And the liturgist podcast really did a good job of mentioning new atheists as an example of blue, which surprised me. But their point was if somebody leaves their religion, but then their new prophet is Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins and their new scriptural text is the end of faith or whatever those books were that came out post 9 11. And what they often lack is the ability to truly be self critical and self analytical. And they look to their leaders and their leaders texts in very much a blue scriptural one true pathway. And science is even science can be embraced in a blue way basically as if science has all truth in it. And if you find some article that says this one thing, then you found the truth. And anybody who disagrees with the authority that backs up the scientific findings will their heritage.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [01:00:43] No, that's bad science, John. Bad science.

John Dehlin [01:00:46] Yeah, it's blue. It's blue. It's blue science.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [01:00:48] It's basic science. We're looking for good science.

John Dehlin [01:00:50] I know, I know. I'm just saying let's not think blue

Glenn Ostlund [01:00:53] is here and say false equivalency. That's all just in honor of Randy. False equivalency is what he would say. But I think if we go on to orange and talk about what orange is.

John Dehlin [01:01:05] Yeah, yeah.

Glenn Ostlund [01:01:07] Recognize that you don't lose your blueness when you expand your awareness into these orange territories. It can help understand why is there still blue even, even when you're orange.

John Dehlin [01:01:18] All right, let's do it. So my only point was don't just think of blue as religion. I think I set blue up to be about religion and it's not. It's about Republican, Democrat, it's about corporate America. And the point I wanted to make that I'd forgotten previously and I'm going to reference sapiens and Glenn referenced it as well. It's a really important book. But I think the blue represents mankind's ability to scale beyond the small sort of Dunbar's number of the small tribes. It is the blue consciousness that lets humans organize in very, very large numbers. And I think it's what leads me to feel that something like religion or even democracy or capitalism is actually a net positive contribution in spite of all their externalities. Because they become the foundation upon which modern civilization has been built. And unless you hate modern civilization, you sort of have to say, for all its defects, democracy, capitalism and religion have brought us to the dance, have brought us to the ball. Now, Gina, you may hate that I said that, but that's kind of how I feel.

Gina Colvin [01:02:34] I love that you said that.

John Dehlin [01:02:35] Okay, good.

Gina Colvin [01:02:37] But I do want to say something. I want to say something in terms of. As a biblical scholar. Well, I'm, you know, a theologian. Blue is a kind of. All of these. All of these colors, or V means are hermeneutics. This is a way that we become aware of something, a lens through which we see the world. And so if you're a blue person and you've got using a blue hermeneutics and trying to exegete the Bible, for instance, you will look for instances of authority and the justification for authority or the reproduction of the status quo or for whatever it is. So, I mean, it's just sort of a good way of thinking about it. It's a way that we interpret the world. You know, the kind of lens that we have on to interpret the world.

Guest [01:03:19] Love it.

Orange: Science, Reason, and Individual Awakening

John Dehlin [01:03:20] All right, let's jump to the next color, which is orange. And again, blue was more community, communal based. Now we have to go back to the individual again. Orange. Think of the Enlightenment. Think about Galileo and, you know, Charles Darwin and all those men and women who 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th century started questioning the religious and political and economic traditions. Think Karl Marx, these sorts of people that said we can do better. We don't like some of these problems. We don't like this corporate stuff. We don't like these bureaucracies. We think that there are some important, significant costs with the corporatism, the bureaucracies of what blue brings institutionally. And so orange questions authority, orange questions blue. Orange sort of seeks to apply things like science to the world, to gather data, to gather evidence, and to establish a worldview based as little on necessarily, quote, authority. In other words, you know, the sort of. Because some important person said so, it must be true, or because the official institution said it's true, it wants to gather data to say, you know, this evidence says that this might be true. I would say this would be the good science that you're talking about. Jamie,

Guest [01:04:53] thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org thank you very much.

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 859

John Dehlin [00:00:02] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking the donate button on the top right side of the page. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support. Now, we always come to you last, Glenn. So why don't we have you talk about orange first in this round?

Glenn Ostlund [00:00:47] Yeah, Well, I think you know the pattern. If I understand and keep in mind, I've only known about spiral dynamics for maybe a week because John tweeted about it and I listened to this podcast and I'm thinking about it. So I'm just saying how I think about it. I'm not saying how it really is, but the way that I've understood it, there's pros and cons. Come to an awareness of the cons and you respond to it. And so the cons in blue, especially if we're talking about a religion and we're talking about this codified mythology, is that these stories aren't really true. That's kind of the big thing for, I think, a lot of us and a lot of this audience that would recognize, oh, wait, all of these stories, beliefs, superstitions, things that tied me to the group. Now I'm starting to question them. My awareness is expanding beyond this literal interpretation of them into, wait a minute now, what do I do with it? And what if it's not true? When you get evidence, you go, oh, that's not true. And I want to. I want to link myself. And again, it's a very individualistic response. I want to link myself to something that is verifiable, based on empirical data, based on evidence. And because we live after the scientific revolution, there's already been kind of this culturally orange permeation in our society. We have places that we can go, but I think that's what orange is. Orange is a response to blue to say, not that necessarily the things about blue that were beneficial, we're gonna sweep under the rug and get rid of it. But how can we fix the problems of blue? And I think that's why you see that sometimes there are blue type thought processes, blue type views of the that still exist in what you would think would be an orange place. Because again, these aren't isolated colors that you graduate from one to Another. They're layered all inside of us now. And so those things that were so beneficial to us in those blue stages are going to manifest themselves in others. So I think orange is just that exploration and saying, prove it.

John Dehlin [00:02:53] I love it. Now, Gina, I want to get you in on Orange, and I just want to ask, is it unfair? And this is sort of when historical criticism maybe comes into play, is it unfair to sort of judge the Old Testament from an orange perspective? In other words, when somebody says, oh, the scriptures are worthless because Noah's flood never happened, isn't that trying to apply orange thinking to a text that never was intending to be orange? Talk about. Talk about your understanding of orange and then how it relates to scripture and faith and other things.

Gina Colvin [00:03:33] Oh, I think if you think about the highlights of the Orange v meme, you're talking about enlightenment and renaissance. You're talking about, like, a huge shift in consciousness, particularly in the West. And so if you. But I think in many respects, there's two things working at the same time. There's a rationality about orange. There is this need to understand and to kind of create a science out of something. So I think good hermeneutics leads us. The good hermeneutics of Orange leads us to ask contextual questions so that we can actually appreciate the text as a purple text. So sort of not one without the other. I mean, on the far side of it, we can say, okay, rationality would suggest that we need to just dismiss the Old Testament as the wafflings of, like, a mountain tribal community that, you know, established, like, a, you know, huge religious tradition. But on the other hand, orange leads us to understand mythology and how narratives work and how humans work. So it's like, it's sort of vital. Does that answer your question? And I kind of thought I was a bit wealthy about that.

John Dehlin [00:04:46] Yeah. No, and I don't even think I was very clear in my question other than just to say that I don't think everybody, let's just say 500 or 1,000 years ago when they're talking, or 2,000 years ago when they're talking about the creation myth, are necessarily really thinking about things like, you know, was there a literal first couple? You know, how does this fit into the evolution of mankind? When we talk about. When we tell the story of Noah's flood, are we really thinking that water flooded the earth in every nook and cranny, or are we just trying to tell a story that's going to have symbolic and moral value to people? Does that make sense?

Gina Colvin [00:05:29] Yeah, it does, yeah.

Orange in Ex-Mormon and Broader Cultural Contexts

John Dehlin [00:05:31] Lindsay, how do we bring you in on orange?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:05:36] So I actually like the orange framework to explain ex Mormonism rather than blue, because we talked about this. You know, I'm, I'm one of the people that's always saying, don't become a mirror of yourself when you leave the church. Don't just, you know, become as righteous outside the church as you do in the church. But the framework here works better for me because this, the orange stage was such an important part of my development. And in many ways orange to me was about deconstructing the blue. And so if we take your ark example, for example, we say, okay, well, the arc's not literal. Logic has shown me, you know, orange is await a new way to think, it's a new way to look at the world. And logic says that the ARC couldn't have happened. And so. But orange is still in that way where it's like, ah, the arc never happened. We know it didn't happen. And as we move up to other models of thinking, we show, well, maybe the arc didn't actually physically exist, but it still matters. But in orange thinking, it's like it didn't exist. Stop with that nonsense. And so it's not really a mirror of blue, but it's like Glenn said, it still has some of those characteristics. And that's why I think like this for ex Mormons better, because you're, in some ways you are flipping your paradigm and becoming a mirror of yourself when you question the church. But that's assuming that people are like coins that flip over rather than evolve and progress. And that's why I like this model, because it allows for evolution rather than just a black and white way to think of things.

John Dehlin [00:07:07] Love it. Jamie, talk to us about orange.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:07:11] I think the easiest way to see orange is sometimes looking at it from how blue people, blue perspective look at orange. So when you hear things like, I don't know where I would be without the church, that is thinking that you can't have any framework beyond, you know, Mormonism, that the big fear is if you abandon this greater good, this tribe, that you become unethical, you have no morals, you have no sense of right and wrong, you completely lose yourself. It's the where will you go if you're not in our boat? And we use this fear of orange as a primary motivating factor. And yet orange is a pretty powerful place to be as an individual. Where you think, I can listen to my inner voice, I can make decisions about me and my family that might transcend or be different from the tribe for my own personal reasons. And I don't need to feel the guilt and shame from the tribe because of them. You know, I mean, it's a simple decision. Like, you know, for us, a big thing is going out to eat now after church on Sunday. It's a super awesome family experience. The pressure is off of me to try and provide, you know, this, this meal, the stress around it. And yet, you know, the tribe looks at it as a terrible thing, you know, the orange part of me. And they say it's immoral, it's unethical, you're violating a commandment, you know, and I look at this and say, no, this is honoring me as a person more. I don't. I don't have to be a slave to my family. I don't have to contribute all of this. You know, we can go and do this and it ends up being one of the most transcendent family experiences that we have. Right. Because you take all the pressures and all the work away from it and you're able to enjoy family time together. But the blue organization does not look very kindly on something as simple as a family dinner at a restaurant on Sunday. And yet, you know, from a personal and family point of view, you know, this is such a beautiful experience of putting the priorities of family time and quality time and using the limited time we have together.

John Dehlin [00:09:25] Well, love it. I'll just add, and this is building on what all of you have said, and particularly I think, what Lindsay said, and that's that we need to look at each color as having strengths and weaknesses and obviously. Oh, and there's a really good point that they make that we'll talk about in a second, which is whatever, whatever meme you're in, whatever place you're in, you look back on the previous memes with disdain. You kind of look down, you kind of shrug your shoulder and turn up your nose to the past sort of V memes, and then you look forward with fear. And I think that's a good point to bring, but to kind of extend what Lindsey was saying. If we look at the pros and cons of orange, orange is great in the sense that it relies on data. It's analytical, it's maybe the least superstitious or magical thinking. It's more alive, it can be more vital, it can be more truer, more grounded in reality, but it also has weaknesses. It can become very mean spirited, it can become very critical, it could become very destructive. One of the things that spiraled in one of the Liturgist podcast talked about is that when orange people start destroying blue, it can put blue people back in red. Do you guys remember that? In other words, if you think about a lot of the crazy things that are happening in society today, we think those of us in orange, and I'm not saying I'm an orange, but like, you know, the orange mentality might say, let's destroy blue. But what happens if you destroy blue and everybody goes back to purple or red? Are we really better off? And so, you know, orange has its virtues, but it also. Try organizing orange people, try getting orange people to gather together for a cause. Jamie, you're wanting to say something, and

Global Conflict and Political Dimensions of Orange

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:11:33] I. I think this is the source of so much of the conflict in the Middle east, right? As. As the civilization becomes more Western, becomes more. My mind just lost the word, you know, more. More.

John Dehlin [00:11:49] Less secular.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:11:49] Relying less on secular.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:11:51] Sorry.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:11:51] As they become more secular, you see the rise of Sharia law and the desire for an Islamic state. You see, you see that the. The leaders are no longer content to rule over a blue sort of situation, and they revert back. So I think you can see it not just on an individual basis, but, you know, macro. And all the world's conflicts sort of revolve in this

John Dehlin [00:12:15] totally. And that's what the Liturgist podcast used. The Middle east is a great example if you think about how progressive and secular, you know, countries like Iraq and Iran and Turkey used to be in the 70s. And then all of a sudden that, you know, whatever that was got blown up. And what you saw is those civilizations actually regressing to previous states that could probably be described as very red. And those situations can be very dictatorial and very violent for all and very primitive for all. Afghanistan, too, a lot of these nations have been destroyed as we became a little bit careless about the value that blue can provide.

Glenn Ostlund [00:13:11] I think we've seen that in the US as well. A couple of months ago, I was watching for the very first time, surprisingly enough, the first season of Saturday Night Live. I'd never sat down and watched all of the episodes. And. And I think that was 1975, 1976, when those were being aired. It was so liberal, politically progressive. They've got Candice Bergen and Gilda Radner just sitting on the stage having a conversation about feminism. And it's the same types of conversations that we're hearing now. But what happened between then and now, there was like some kind of regression where. I don't know. So I think we see that same pattern here. And maybe it's just as people are raising their awareness and we're talking about values, that's what the V and V mean means, the values that they have and trying to understand where those values lie. What are the pros, what are the cons? There's a lot of push and pull and give and take in that.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:14:13] And it's always easier to see it in someone else than to see it in ourselves. It is very difficult to be self reflective sometimes about where we are along this continuum.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:14:24] And on that note, I was gonna say that using American politics in this last year since Trump was elected, I like to see myself engaged in other colors. But this election has set me into blue, into orange, into red, probably the most. I mean, really reactive, sometimes almost like animalistic, you know, like when Trump was elected, all I did was eat a bag of Cheetos, no joke. Like that was. I was beiging it the entire night. So I think that's what I mean. This idea that we fluctuate in this spiral, I think is really important because I don't think that I'm developed enough to talk about politics in a way that I want to, that fully, like, appreciates the wholeness of the story. But sometimes it's just really fun to talk about politics in red, you know.

John Dehlin [00:15:13] Yeah, it's fun, but it may not always be constructive. And we know about the backfire effect, that we can actually create more resistance and more social stagnation if we don't watch our rhetoric. Right. But it certainly can be fun and at least cathartic to go red or beige and. Yeah, so. And I would even say that to some extent, many people who have interpreted, tried to explain the ascent of Trump, it's almost a reaction. They try and say it's a reaction to overly orange or overly politically correct sort of analysis of the state of the Union. And there's a lot of people that feel alienated by these sort of elitist, politically correct sort of conversations. And because we maybe didn't bring the whole nation along into a conversation about multiculturalism and enlightenment and maybe some higher values, we saw some of the previous, some of the earlier colors rise up and say, hey, you're not going to orange us into your reality. We're going to have to do this conversation together. And if we're ignored, then we're gonna see progress, retard a little bit until we can all kind of get on the same page. So anyway, that's orange, and that takes us to our final color in this sort of basic analysis of spiral dynamics before we move to the second tier phases of consciousness. But the final color that spiral dynamics gives us in this base sort of framework is green. And green is again, orange was more individualistic. So now we're going back to the communal again. And green is basically saying that, no, wait a minute, what if it's possible that all of these different colors have value, that lots of different stories have merit, that everyone's story needs to be considered? And it's very sort of non hierarchical, it's very grassroots, sort of grounded. It definitely values spirituality over religion. I think it would value grassroots politics over corporate politics. It would value, let's just say, sustainable farming and, and local sort of farmers markets and local consumption of goods over sort of Walmart, big box, corporate sort of thinking. And so that is sort of green, this sort of communal progressive consciousness. Gina, would you talk about green first?

Green: Social Justice, Pluralism, and Inclusion

Gina Colvin [00:18:22] Sure. And I like green. I was trained in green,

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:18:27] particularly when

Gina Colvin [00:18:27] it comes to critical theory. And if you think about the timeline, I think green appears about 200 years ago as there's sort of, you know, that kind of Greek, Aristotelian and Platonic and, you know, Socratic worldview or hermeneutic becomes, you know, people become wary of it and asking themselves questions about their own existence. So existentialism, those French and German philosophers, Sartre, Nietzsche and Derrida Lyotard, all of these philosophers emerge, these kind of continental philosophers emerge and jump into the scene and they ask questions about our own consciousness and they point to this sociocentric quality that we've lost in our grasping and falling all over to get what we want. So they draw us back to the idea of community and group and this idea of love and personal growth and harmony. And so they say, look, basically the existentialist creed is I feel something, therefore I am, and let's pay attention to what we feel.

John Dehlin [00:19:46] Love it. Jamie, why don't you talk to us about. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about green?

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:19:53] So because it was Martin Luther King this week, and because I was reading about spiral dynamics, as I was going, I came across this quote and I thought, oh, this is a true sentiment. And I really could relate to it and recognize where I kind of needed to change. He says, on the one hand, we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not constantly, will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It is not haphazard or superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. And I thought, oh, this is a green sentiment, you know, that charity has no place in green. Revolutionary restructuring so that we don't have winners and losers is a really green sentiment. While charity has a place, you know, providing peanut butter sandwiches to homeless people while alleviating an hourly need does nothing to help a greater need. And this green sentiment on how to, how to structure civilization, how to structure the work that we do as individuals, how we structure the way we spend our time and the change and effect that we want to have and the legacy we want to leave behind probably warrants greater self reflection and better use of resources to provide benefits far beyond the charitable acts that meet the needs in the moment, but that will go on to meet long term needs and create a better world for us all to live in.

John Dehlin [00:21:40] Love it. Glenn, talk to us about green.

Glenn Ostlund [00:21:45] Well, I think it's following the same pattern. In Orange. We had kind of this individual awakening that things in blue had problems. Those things from my experience, I kind of went through the orange and the green in almost the same time. Because, you know, if my blue experience was the church and especially the mission, after my mission, when I started going to graduate school and attending a university that wasn't byu, then kind of that orange mentality started requiring me to be a little bit more rigorous in the claims that I was making and the evidence that I needed to support those claims. And that went from kind of an individualistic orange to a group green very quickly because I was in graduate school. So Green's kind of more of this progressive liberal, recognizing the shortcomings of blue, where you've got very strong us versus them societies. And Green asks, well, what about the them? Let's stop villainizing the other. Let's have value for everybody, whether it's lgbt, whether it's gender inequality, whether the church is a bunch of white guys from the U.S. it's not really a global church. There's this awareness that there's other people out there on margins that are suffering as a result of this blue organization. And so green is more of a people coming together, agreeing that we need to look out for the people that have been disenfranchised. So I think that's green, like in everyone. There's the pros and the cons. And I think in Green There's a con that's really interesting. A couple of months ago, I was very lucky to meet Jonathan Haidt. I think many of you know who Jonathan Haidt is, was able to do an interview with him that will be published in a couple of weeks on the Luminous Brain podcast. Michael Ferguson, Plug. And one of the things that Jonathan Haidt said in that interview is that there's this culture. He didn't call it green culture. We didn't talk about spiral dynamics, but he said there's this culture of people that have been raised, I think, born after 1995, I generation, whatever it's called, that have been taught that you cannot challenge somebody's lived experience. If you invalidate somebody's lived experience, that's an act of violence. And so, as a result, because green is so averse to violence, that it's very accepting, it's very relativistic, it accepts all kinds of things. And you can't really have a discussion. It's a hard discussion or a debate without people feeling that they've been harmed or injured in some way. And so it shuts down real discussion in that sense. I don't know. He said it better than I just did there, but. So I think that's where green is. One of the things that the podcast we listened to, talked about is you will have movements like Occupy Wall street or, you know, things like that that are very green organizations, but because they're green, it's hard for them to get anything done because they can't. They can't make everybody agree with everything. So that's one of the challenges of a green.

John Dehlin [00:25:09] It's like the Judean People's front clip from the Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Glenn Ostlund [00:25:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:14] Where they're sitting around arguing about, you know, they're trying to gain consensus before they make some sort of a. Make sort of decision. But because everybody has to be equally respected and valued and all different perspectives have to be factored in, very little actually ends up getting done.

Glenn Ostlund [00:25:32] And so the group part of the blue and the bureaucratic group part, I think, is still. Can be evidenced in green in that way.

John Dehlin [00:25:42] Interesting. Yeah. Lindsey, talk to us.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:25:47] I have a lot of feelings about. About this color just because I. I've spent a lot of time in the last few years, I think, in this color and in the work that I do. So to use my life as an

John Dehlin [00:25:57] example, meaning sunstone or meaning FLDS stuff, both.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:26:02] But I'm going to use polygamy for just a minute because I think sun's More developed than I am. So I. I started off the year polygamy podcast hating polygamy, thinking it was terrible and awful. That was sort of my blue or sometimes even my red feelings about it. And then as I learned more, I realized it was more complicated. The logic and the orange sort of disrupted that. And then I came to a place with the green, which is, okay, we know that there's a problem here of inequity, and yet I have all this other evidence that shows that it's more complicated. What do I do with it? And the green in me says, well, how does my approach feed the human spirit? You know, like, what is missing in my approach? And so green is my. Was my attempt to reconcile it. But as Glenn said, it does have some problems. I have sometimes found myself over correcting and sympathizing with things that need more accountability. I deal with a lot of criminals in this practice. And in my goal to understand how people get here, sometimes I leave out the accountability piece and don't give that enough. Enough weight. And so what I do is, you know, people will say, well, you're just giving these guys who have done horrible things a pass. And in my mind, it's the green. Like, what about the others? I'm trying to understand how people get here, because if we can understand how they get here, then maybe we can correct the problem. But I think green is a good starting place. But it's something I've been struggling with too, which is, we have these good theories, we have these good rules and accountability, but how do we feed the human spirit? And green is an attempt to reconcile those things.

Glenn Ostlund [00:27:45] I think it's not easy being green.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:27:49] There you go.

John Dehlin [00:27:50] Nod to Jim Henson. I really liked this analogy that the Liturgist podcast used. They basically said as a way to sum up these different 6V memes, they said, if you were gonna sell a car to each of the V memes, here's how it would go to a beige. A beige person wouldn't have a car. They'd be walking around, carrying sticks or whatever. A purple person having sex. Right. Don't even need a car because you're having sex. No, A purple person, you would sort of use the bandwagon effect and you would tell them who's buying it. So it would be sort of like, all the cool kids are doing it. Join the club of the cool kids. Very tribal. Actually, Glenn, your joke sort of bled in, because a red person, if you're gonna sell a car to a red person, you would use things like Sexuality, power. It would be like a Corvette, it would be a Camaro. It would be sort of the macho buy this and and a woman eating a cheeseburger with a bikini as the car, you know, sitting on the car. That would be the way that you would sell a car to a red person. A blue person would be sort of the Chevy built on American values, sort of the America home and mother and apple pie sort of way that you would sell to a blue person. To an orange person, you would sell a car by basically telling them all about the statistics of the car and the safety and the horsepower and the velocity and all the different sort of stats that go into buying a car. And then finally to a green person, you would basically say save the world and buy a Prius. If you buy a Prius, you'll be contributing less to global warming and helping eco friendly environments throughout the world. So that's a summary of the different colors. Now what I'd like to do is turn this sort of analysis on some various aspects to Mormonism. I'm just going to throw these out to the panel and I want people to sort of answer it. Does anybody want to give sort of a view of Mormon culture and history through this lens? And Lindsay, maybe I'll start with you. Do you want to try and take a quick stab at the evolution of Mormonism within these lenses? And then we'll ask Gina next.

Does Mormonism Spiral Up or Down Over Time

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:30:30] Are you asking if Mormonism follows the trajectory of these colors?

John Dehlin [00:30:35] I'm saying, as you think about these colors and then you ponder about the evolution of Mormonism, is there anything that sticks out?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:30:43] Well, I mean, yeah, I draw parallels all the time to that, but I think that the way that I like to think about Joseph's early church is actually has a lot of green in the beginnings and actually goes to blue as it develops. I mean, that's how I see it in the history and that's super reductive. But I think that at different times, if you're looking at an institution, institutions adopt different strategies for survival as they go along. And so it's different than individual development. Does that make sense?

John Dehlin [00:31:15] Sure.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:31:17] So I think with the church, I mean, the church to me, like I said, like Delaney jokes, he often embodies blue. To me, that doesn't mean he's blue, it's not a label. But to me he's a representation of this black and white legalistic thinking. Mormonism isn't always lived that way for a lot of people though. I mean, in my lived experience I said, you know, I Had a lot of magical, superstitious thinking. That is what Mormonism was to me for a long, long time. And it really wasn't black and white, was more based on these sort of stories and myths and things like that. So I don't know that we can say that. I don't see Mormonism developing along the spectrum, if that's what you're asking.

John Dehlin [00:31:56] That's fine. I was curious your point, Jamie, what do you want to, what do you want to say?

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:32:01] Because I think this is the core of this philosophy, which is that we spiral. I feel like, you know, once you arrive at green at the top, you're kind of navel gazing. You want to change the world, but the way to change the world is to start a blue organization and come up with a mission statement and then get everybody aboard and you need purple people who want to do this. And you recruit based on, you know, the tribe that you're doing and you, you spiral down and then the organization grows and you spiral back up and you start spiral down and then you spiral back up. I think that it's fluid, it's going back and forth. So I totally agree. I think Joseph Smith probably had some deep thoughts. You know, this is what I like. This is different from the other church. I don't agree with these other things. I have these great thoughts. You know, how are we going to do this? Let's all get together, have a school of prophets, you know, we can all commune one with another. But the reality is, in order to organize any sort of movement to affect the change that you want, you know, you move back to glue and you experience persecution. You spiral down to purple and you spiral down to red. You know, you have to protect your territory. And, you know, I think you can watch Mormonism go down and up and down and up. And I think you can watch every organization and I think you can watch, look at it in your own self, you know. Yeah. You sit around and meet with your friends who share the same values and ideals that you do. And you think, you know, what can we do to make this better? Well, you create an organization and you have a mission statement and you do this. And you know, this is the beauty of it, is that one level is not superior to another and that you can build forwards and backwards.

John Dehlin [00:33:35] I love it. Gina, what are your reflections on Mormonism and spiral dynamics? Can we say that the modern Mormon Church is a blue church? And then what else do you want to add?

Gina Colvin [00:33:49] Oh, I think if you. And I'm going to revert to Faith development theory, and you know, what you seem to be positing is like a kind of pastoral question, which is, why does. And faith development theory would say we need to look at a nodal development level? Like, what are we calibrating at? And I think most certainly we're calibrating at the blue level. But as Jamie said, we have bits of all institutionally blue level, but, you know, institutionally we have all of those. Those colors representative and flaring up at various times. So in terms of a pastoral approach to this locus of development or the locus. This concentration of, I suppose ministerial and missional effort is certainly looking very blue. But the question is, how does it maintain that broad spectrum of sensibilities along its own spiral of development or dynamic. I keep using development. Sorry.

John Dehlin [00:35:00] No, it's great.

Gina Colvin [00:35:01] It's great.

John Dehlin [00:35:03] Glenn.

Glenn Ostlund [00:35:06] I don't know that I have anything to add to what's already been said. I think I. I think I'm pretty comfortable with what's been said. You know, it's interesting to think about the world that Joseph Smith lived in. And the question that I have is, did he grow up in a very blue world? That's what the culture, the society was like at the time. And with the folk magic that they had was that kind of their version of science, that maybe he saw some of the problems in blue and started expanding his awareness into some of these orange areas and using the folk magic as a way to create a new blue organization. And then Brigham Young comes around and he redifies it. You know, I don't know. I could play around with those ideas, but I haven't given it much thought, really.

John Dehlin [00:35:55] I'll just say, and it's never good to disagree with Lindsay Hansa park, but I do think there's a little bit of a mapping on the. From my reading of Mormon history, you could see Joseph Smith early on as a shaman in a small tribe. You could see that there's a lot of mysticism in early Mormonism and a lot of tribalism. And then you see Mormonism maybe go a little bit red with Brigham Young, where he becomes a bit of a dictator. And there's a lot of emphasis on strength and sort of a, you know, dictatorship really. And then you see, as polygamy gets jettisoned, at least, you know, post manifesto. And as we see Mormonism move into the 20th century, you see the corporatization of Mormonism, and you see it becoming a lot more like IBM, a lot more bureaucratic, a lot more kind of stiff and rigid, but also Highly developed, highly structured, the handbook of instructions, the dress code, all the different correlation sort of activities to make it a lot more like McDonald's than it was maybe the original church. And then what you see in the past few decades is the attempt to apply, and it starts with BH Roberts, maybe, and others, but it certainly catches on with, with dialogue and Sunstone and Sandra Tanner, and then even entering into the bloggernackle and the podcast communities of the past 10 years. You see us trying to really apply evidence and science and enlightened views to Mormonism. And that's really, I think, what sense sort of dialogue and all the past things of the 10 years are about. It's basically saying what's true, what's not, what holds up to scientific scrutiny, what doesn't. Let's question authority. And where is the church falling short in terms of taking care of people on the margins? And so now what we have is people like the thoughtful faith community, like faith again, like Sunstone. Honestly, it's these groups that are saying, wait a minute, what if there's more than one way to Mormon? What if you can be a progressive and a liberal Mormon but stay in the church? And what if there's value as a stage three, you know, founder, stage three Mormon, but also let's validate the stage four with more pastoral apologetics, but then let's strive for a givens, sort of a neo apologetic Givens, Bushman, Patrick Mason, like big tent Mormonism, where all of the different players can be valued. Now, Lindsay, do you just totally reject that as a potential sort of way to frame Mormon culture and history as it's evolved? Does that make you sick inside?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:39:11] I'm so sick. No.

John Dehlin [00:39:13] Does that make you want to eat cheetahs?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:39:16] I think it's a very yellow approach to Mormon history, but for me, it's still like, too linear. For me, it's valid. And I agree with it that that could be one legitimate interpretation. But for me, I just don't see it as linear. I think that there have been times when they've gone to all different strategies, as everybody does. I think there are colors that adapt better with institutions. Blue and orange. Orange is one of them. But it doesn't really show up in Mormonism. So I think. I don't know, it's too linear for me. But I take your point. Okay, we're agreeing and we're not agreeing.

Gina Colvin [00:39:58] How about that?

John Dehlin [00:39:59] I love it.

Glenn Ostlund [00:40:00] A few years ago, I started, and stopped pretty quickly a project that I called Early Mormon Audio, where I was reading books and one of the ones that I did and didn't finish was key to the science of theology, I think, is what it was called. It was Parley P. Pratt, and he was so excited about how Mormon teachings lined up with science. So to say that there wasn't an orange v meme at play Even in the 1850s, 1860s Mormonism, I think there was. I think that was part of what excited early converts to the Mormon Church is that they started to see there's more than just this traditional, stagnated blue culture and organization. There's more out there and, you know, their understanding of science and magic and stories and, you know, it was. We can debate how accurate it was now, but I think the experience for them was this excitement at being able to validate their religious experiences based on what they saw as scientific evidence in the everyday world. So I think that's definitely a part of Mormon's evolution. It is mainly blue, a little bit of orange, a little bit of red, and just kind of that whole blending thing.

John Dehlin [00:41:29] Jamie, did you want to add something?

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:41:32] You know, I think it's just a very healthy way to look at our own cultural experiences as, you know, moving up and moving back down. I think the hard part is I do feel like we're in a retrenchment. I do feel like we're in a spiraling down.

John Dehlin [00:41:49] You're saying specifically with Russell M. Nelson, Thomas S. Monson, Russell M. Nelson, with Uchtdorf being jettisoned, with Oaks being brought into the First Presidency.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:41:59] You know, those things, the things that actually concern me the most, occur, you know, at the local levels. For example, one of the new things they do over the last, you know, five to 10 years is, you know, no longer are people given topics with which to research for, say, sacrament meeting talks. Instead, they're given somebody's conference talk for them to just read and then re regive. You know, we've moved to where individuals don't have a voice in the community and your job is to take in somebody else's positions and just regurgitate it back to the congregation. You know, we've elevated authority so much that individuals don't have a voice. So those sorts of behaviors and controlling behaviors are more concerning to me than the leadership at the top. You know, for most people, their lived experience of Mormonism occurs their ward with the members that live close to them. But, you know, right now, I have no idea how people think. I don't know if in their mind they're having orange or green thoughts about, you know, Doctrinal issues or about morality or about ethics. Because when they're given a topic to speak on, their job is to regurgitate what a leader has already said. And that's the authority. You don't have any personal authority. And I feel like that's where we miss out on the richness you talk to people, you know, 20, 25 years ago or prior to correlation, you know, I think Mormonism experienced a much broader. People's individual thoughts were valued. I feel like we're not individually valuing people's experiences.

John Dehlin [00:43:35] Gina, do you agree that. Do you agree that maybe some of the modern movements of the LDS Church is maybe spiraling the church a little bit downward in the stack, so to speak? Do you have thoughts about how maybe even these new first presidency changes sort of bode for which kind of direction we're moving as an institution?

Gina Colvin [00:43:58] I think organizations are always, and particularly churches are always in some form of motion. I'm actually really optimistic. I will have to say. I know this is unpopular about this new move of President Nelson because it will, because there's already intense fragility. But I suppose the everyday practice of Mormonism as being plausible deniability, this idea that, you know, you can come along, Jamie can come along to church, I can go along to church in this place for us. But in many respects this blue is just going to flare up because it's kind of the last ditch attempt to try and stem, I suppose, the flaring out of that orange and green and even yellow sensibilities that are existing there. And you know, Nelson yesterday showed his hand, you know, where there had been questions about 132 and polygamy. Elder Nelson basically said, my doctrine of women comes from a polygamous doctrine, a polygamous scripture. And I think that that's great because that shows a hand, like to kind of shed away the rest of the colors and see where the dominant nodal development level is, is excellent. And it's not nice, but I think that in the arc of human history, we always come up, it's inevitable that we come up against this moment, this last fortress of thought before that becomes intolerable and we break through that.

John Dehlin [00:45:27] Are you saying that there's sort of a long arc of history and it bends towards institutions naturally, hopefully evolving from blue to more green institutions. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Gina Colvin [00:45:39] Inevitably, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:41] And that's kind of what Protestant Christianity and Judaism probably both have?

Gina Colvin [00:45:47] I think so, yeah. And even Roman Catholicism.

John Dehlin [00:45:49] Right.

Gina Colvin [00:45:51] They've had to let things go because they they, you know, that promises to force them into obscurity, and they always want to be relevant. You know, you had the Second Vatican Council. Was this an attempt to address these, you know, these orange and these green questions that are bubbling around the perimeter of their faith life. And so they had to just let go of some things. I think this will be Mormonism. It's sort of. This is what will happen.

John Dehlin [00:46:16] Yeah. And I think the liturgist podcast made it clear that there really are. There is such thing as a green church or a blue church. And to make the point that no one level is better than another or what, you know, they made the point of trying being a green person who's in a blue church. It doesn't feel very good to be a green in a blue church. And conversely, it doesn't feel very good to be a blue person in a green church. You know, imagine how somebody wanting structure and order and who's comfortable with tradition trying to go to a Unitarian church that is talking about saving the planet and global warming, depending on who you are, Right? Yep, exactly. Too many people. Let me. As we close, because we have to

Glenn Ostlund [00:47:07] kind of close, are you going to talk about yellow and turquoise?

Yellow and Turquoise: Integral Consciousness

John Dehlin [00:47:10] Yeah, that's where I'm going right now. So the podcast ends talking about two final colors, yellow and turquoise. And it basically talks about these final colors as being sort of next phases of consciousness. So green is sort of the level of consciousness so many of us are aware of. When it puts forward yellow. It's basically saying that there's this new level of consciousness where you look at things in terms of a unified system, where you basically say all these different V memes are interconnected. There's an emphasis on nonviolence. There's an emphasis on inclusivity. You can see the shortfalls in every V meme, and you can see the benefits in every V meme. And what your focus on isn't on fighting for whatever your perspective is, but instead it's seeking to unify and to respect all different paths for the good, to see them, the bad, for what they are, and then go forward. So now here's what I want to do with yellow. I want to ask Lindsay, Gina, and Glenn each to analyze their respective projects as it relates to these colors and tell us whether you know whether your respective organizations are seeing themselves in any of these colors and specifically whether you're striving for yellow, you know, as a way to sort of lead your organization. So, Lindsay, are you comfortable sort of placing sunstone anywhere along this spiral? Or not.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:48:53] Yeah, I mean, that's a really great question. So Sunstone has gone through a whole entire history, 40 years of it, where it's probably gone all over this spiral, been in many different colors. Yellow is a good place that the organization can be, but it's. Yellow is almost activist to me. Like, it's almost like trying to solve the problems of the other colors. And Sunstone, I think, has a different goal in that it wants to be a place that allows the colors to sort of sort themselves out a little bit, if that makes sense. So what we're trying to do.

John Dehlin [00:49:31] Lindsay, can I just challenge you really quickly? I think green is activist. I think yellow is trying to say everyone has their place. And that's why I thought of Sunstone when I thought of yellow.

Glenn Ostlund [00:49:42] But I don't.

John Dehlin [00:49:43] I'm not trying to. I'm not trying to disagree with you, but no.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:49:46] So my. Well, maybe I'm just misunderstanding, but I understood yellow to be like. Yellow is a response to the frustration that green can't quite come to a decision on anything, and so it wants to be a little bit more decisive.

John Dehlin [00:50:02] Yellow is described as inclusive, as seeing everything as being connected.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:50:08] Well, in that case, I would like to hope that that's where we're headed with Sunstone, because we are trying to tie everything back to Mormonism. I don't. I always say this. I don't think we're the city of Enoch yet, but we are trying to allow it. And it's one of the few places that I know of where so many diverse people can get together. You know, state presidents can come, young women's presidents, relief stated. Presidents can come hang out with Mormon fundamentalists and atheists and ex Mormons and non Mormons and everything in between. And so to me, that's the work that I'm really interested in right now, because, like I said, I've been wounded by being in some of these other colors and by other people being in those colors. So we're trying to be a place where people can work out sort of this palette of development and allow everyone their place and their sense of development. And so I guess what I'm worried about, the activist thing, because we're not trying to sense is not trying to change anyone's mind. We're not trying to keep anyone in the church or make anyone leave the church, rather. We're just saying that would be green.

John Dehlin [00:51:13] That would be green.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:51:13] Yeah, yeah, exactly. You are where you're at. We just want to be here with you while you're There.

John Dehlin [00:51:19] Yeah. I want to encourage you, Lindsay, to consider embracing yellow as the V meme for sunstone, because I think that there's a good match there based on your leadership. So, anyway, I love it, Gina. Oh, yeah, Gina. If I had, and I don't mean to again, colors don't mean good or bad, better or worse. If I had to describe what I understand a thoughtful faith goal to be and kind of your ministry going forward, it would be to help explore ways that Mormonism can move from blue to green. Do you reject that framing of what you're trying to do? And if so, how do you want to frame what you're doing in your personal ministry and in a thoughtful faith podcast as it relates to the development of Mormonism?

Gina Colvin [00:52:12] There's a lot of questions in there, John. Can I deal with the first one?

John Dehlin [00:52:17] Absolutely.

Glenn Ostlund [00:52:18] You have to answer them all and in order.

Gina Colvin [00:52:21] Oh, can you give me the first one again?

John Dehlin [00:52:24] What are you doing? How does a thoughtful faith see itself in what it's trying to contribute to the Mormon stages of development within Mormon society?

Gina Colvin [00:52:39] Oh, you know, this is really interesting. I think. I think as it's gone along, I have been less interested in Mormonism. I've been more interested in creating a space where people can bring their questions of spiritual growth outside of the structures of Mormonism. So, you know, I mean, you know, we have homily. I'm starting to use, like, kind of the blue of that. That Christian tradition, the larger Christian tradition and liturgy, etc. To create an eruption in the certainties of more of Mormonism. So I don't know if that explains. But, you know, what's the. The outcome? I mean, you know, I'm really passionate about growth. Spiritual growth or an enlargement of consciousness. And, yeah, I suppose that's what underscores it, but also to deal with the harm that's done by that inner critic that draws on the guilt of and the shame that's created in that blue space? I don't know. I'm just. I feel like I'm waffling. So what do you think? You know, I mean, yellow. Yellow is interesting because it asks lots of good questions. I hope that I do that. But it gets quite analytical. Doesn't really have a good end goal, kind of. Yeah, yeah. It can be quite sort of cool about the larger integrated questions. So I don't know if. I don't know, maybe that. I mean, only a couple of weeks into 2008, so I don't know.

John Dehlin [00:54:18] Sure, sure. All right. Well, I just thought it'd be fun to try and see how we can apply each of our individual projects to this paradigm a little bit. Glenn, what are you thinking about this spiral dynamics as it relates to infants on Thrones and the things you care about?

Glenn Ostlund [00:54:36] Well, before I talk about infants on thrones, I just want to make sure that we're kind of all on the same page, what we mean when we're talking about yellow and when we're talking about turquoise. Because what I understood from the Liturgist podcast, they said that there's a division in spiral dynamics and people that accept all the colors up to green, and they say there's actually evidence that we can point to that shows that there's development in society based on these classifications and these V means. And with the yellow and the turquoise, you're like, well, maybe this is

Gina Colvin [00:55:12] if

Glenn Ostlund [00:55:12] we're able to predict what's going to happen or maybe even what's happening right now. Let's call that yellow, where the individual is waiting, waking up to the pros and cons of what came before and adapting to that. And that's kind of yellows in that individual space. And then turquoise is the group manifestation of all of these yellows coming together and trying to do it. That's the way I understood it. Are you guys comfortable with that?

John Dehlin [00:55:37] Sure. This is just.

Glenn Ostlund [00:55:40] If that's the case with infants on thrones, I feel like it's a lot of orange coming out of blue. Like, striving to green is kind of. I think what we were doing, and maybe that's still what some of the other infants are doing and where they are. We haven't had our V meme conversation or our spiral dynamic conversation with the other infants. So I don't really know where they're seeing it, but if I'm looking at them and the project as a whole, I think what we've been doing has been as people are coming out of the religion, which would be blue, and they're seeing things in orange that are problematic. We've been validating that. We've been doing it with humor and mocking and other things in kind of a green type of way. Did you say, John, that green, one of the goals of green would be to get people out of blue?

John Dehlin [00:56:40] Not necessarily, no. But there's an activist flavor to green. Yeah, that's all.

Glenn Ostlund [00:56:46] So I think that's probably where infants has been. One of the things that was really interesting to me as I was listening to that liturgist podcast, when they talked about yellow, they said that yellow is a Chameleon, a yellow person hides. A yellow person understands the other V memes, and they can mimic the other V memes, and they can manipulate the other V memes to achieve whatever their goals are. I think I've been yellow for a while. I think I've been yellow. And that's why Jake called me the TBM whisperer. Things where, like, I'm trying to step into these other V memes, trying to understand it, trying to validate it, even if it's not popular to do that, because an orange isn't going to want to say relativism is cool. So I think I personally am more of a yellow. And what I'd like infants to be is not striving for a green goal, but striving for a turquoise goal. And so, like, when Gina's talking about expanding spirituality, expanding consciousness, expanding awareness, that's awesome to me. And like, a group of people who are doing that to me, that's a turquoise group. And that would be my desired end goal for all of this.

John Dehlin [00:58:10] I love it. I love it. And again, I see a lot of what Lindsay's doing in sunstone as sort of a yellow, turquoise effort. And that's the spirit with which I brought you all together today. Jamie, you wrote something wonderful, which is that before your five children revert entirely to red and beige and declare war, you need to give us some final thoughts. So, Jamie, as you read through this Spiral Dynamics, is there anything that you want to share with us to conclude that you think is interesting or relevant to kind of where we are, 2018 in Mormonism and as citizens of the world?

Closing Reflections on Spiral Dynamics and Faith

Jamie Hanis-Handy [00:58:53] I agree with Glenn. I really related to that chameleon effect. Like, I really know how to blend in with whichever group I'm. I'm with, and kind of can take the value and people call it whatever, you know, whatever they want. But, you know, pick and choose the values that. That I want right now. And. And it is not valued by any particular group. That chameleon style. I understand the label that I get sometimes of hypocrite or disingenuous or some of those. You know, I can see how the other colors look at that sort of chameleon person and don't necessarily value that, but, you know, I value it, and it's working for me. It's working for my family. I'm definitely not holding it up as some exemplary way to do. You know, everybody is traveling this path, and I think there's just a lot of this overview and framework allows people to look at other people's stages and recognize, you know, where they are and what things. And I think it. If you can sort of look at and identify what color you might think someone is experiencing, you know, then it helps you to help them recognize the value of that. And also the costs that come with. Provides you a framework for dealing with conflict, you know, when things aren't going well with. With someone or with family members or, you know, with things that are going on. I think it's a. I think it's a nice framework. All analogies and frameworks have flaws, but I think for me, it allowed a lot of, you know, I just found after listening to it, I had a lot to write about myself. You know, just journaling and thinking about, you know, what my personal goals are. I think this gives people a way to say, you know, what personal goals do I want to work for? Which place do I want to be? And how can I help the communities and the people that I interact with better, experience better. Our goal is to experience happiness, right? To provide joy and to experience joy. I know it sounds so totally Mormon, but, you know, being happy is a great thing to want. I think it's a universal human desire. I think everybody would put happiness and fulfillment, you know, at the top of their hierarchy of needs. And this just gave you steps of how to move towards it and recognition that wherever you are on the path doesn't mean that you are not going to experience joy. That joy occurs at each level. But, you know, sometimes you have to really revert to the, yeah, we need to win this war or we want to win this game. You know, if you're cheering for a football team, I mean, the way to experience joy is to have the cake match and the colors and the flag hung and you bond together. And, you know, there's joy at each level. And I don't know, it's a nice framework for how to get groups of people all on the same page, happy.

John Dehlin [01:01:41] Love it.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [01:01:42] All right. And I do have to sign off.

John Dehlin [01:01:43] Thanks, Jamie, Hannah, Sandy, it's so great to have you. Thank you so much for joining us. Lindsay, do you want to give us some final thoughts on if or how this framework, you know, might have some value for us or for you going forward?

Gina Colvin [01:01:58] Yeah.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:01:59] I think the only thing that I'll say that I haven't already said is I really like this framework because it allows for more complexity. It doesn't allow someone to be in a label, and it acknowledges that all of us have these characteristics and it's not the wholeness of ourselves. In the moment, like I said, I tend to engage in blue and orange in politics more, but not so much in the work that I do with Sunstone. And so I think it's just a good framework for us to understand where we situate how we look at the world. And then the application that I think would be useful to apply it unto ourselves is to see how other people where they're at and to recognize that there's no such thing as a blue person. Like I said, Dallin H. Oaks represents blue to me in the church, but I think in other aspects of his life, he is probably all over the spectrum like we are. And for me, that's a helpful shift to realize that we're all kind of in this together, doing our best. Even though we have all of these impediments that we have to face in these challenges, people don't have to stay there.

John Dehlin [01:03:10] I love it. Support Sunstone support Year of Polygamy Podcast Lindsay, it's always a pleasure to have you on Mormon stories.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:03:19] Thank you, friend.

John Dehlin [01:03:20] I'm going to give Gina the last word. So, Glenn, any final thoughts you want to share?

Glenn Ostlund [01:03:25] Yeah, I've got two or three, so I hope you don't have to wrap up too quickly. The first thing there was something that they said on the Liturgist podcast that I thought was really insightful, and it was that brains make minds and minds make culture. And what I think that means is that the brain, our organ, the cooperation of all of the different functions that our brain does, is what creates a mind or a soul or a person. That's what you are. It's your brain doing all these different things. All the senses that you have, the awareness, the consciousness that makes a mind. Different minds working together create culture. That's a very interesting idea to explore. It didn't go to the next step. But my question what are different cultures that work together, creating what would that look like? And I don't have an answer to that. But it's an interesting question that came to me as I was listening to that podcast. So that's one thing I wanted to say in closing. Another thing I think we've been saying that there really isn't one V meme that's better than another. I don't know that I totally agree with that. I think that there are certain contexts, certain situations where certain v memes are probably the best ones to be in. Gina talked about sex at the beginning. Being in a beige v meme in sex is way better than being in an orange v meme in sex. Because then you're thinking about. You're analyzing everything. No, you want to get out of that. So I think there's definitely. We can say there's places where one V meme is better than another. But I also think if you just look at this group and how harsh we were blue, we can't really escape. When you're in an orange and you're looking backwards, you're saying that all of these things are an adaption of recognizing pros and cons. Well, what is a con? And what's the reason for trying to adapt to a con? You know, you don't want to revert. You don't want to go backwards. You know, we talk about Brigham Young as ruining whatever it was that Joseph Smith was trying to do possibly. You know, so I think there. It is complicated. It's not simple. Everything with this, there is some nuance. But to just say 1v meme is not better than another isn't totally true. I can't totally buy that. So there's that. And then probably the final thing.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:05:56] So wait, what is turquoise, Glenn? Is it the celestial kingdom to go with your analogy? Where are we at with that?

Glenn Ostlund [01:06:01] No, I think. I mean, I think turquoise. So turquoise is, you know, that. That Four Season song, the Age of Aquarius, and what all the hippies were wanting at the end of the 60s, and they thought that the 70s was gonna usher in this golden age. You know, in religion, you talk about the millennium and these. These predictions of people living in harmony with each other, this idealistic utopian society. I think that's turquoise, and it's unrealized at this point. It's a dream. It's a vision of people that are yellow, which then they recognize the value of all Venus and are able to set aside the judgments and, you know, bringing everybody together, I think is the turquoise ideal to strive for. But I don't think it's been realized anywhere. But I do want to say if I can put in a plug for Infants on Thrones, that we're doing a listener essay contest. And I've got five essays from listeners right now. I'm looking for more. So if there's somebody wants to record something and say something, whether it's on this topic or anything about Mormonism, we're giving away $200 to the winner, $100 to second place, $50 to third. And so if you're interested in that, our website, infantsonthrones.com, there's a section that talks about the essay contest, but that's it. And you're on mute right now, John. It's all in the service of creating the unrealized turquoise community.

John Dehlin [01:07:36] Thank you, Glenn. It's great to have you on Mormon Stories podcast. I really respect you and what you guys do on emphasis on thrones. And thanks for your enthusiasm for this topic. Gina, you get the final word. Dr. Gina Colvin.

Gina Colvin [01:07:51] Oh, this is really cool, because I'm gonna. I'm going to go all God on you.

John Dehlin [01:07:55] All right.

Gina Colvin [01:07:56] And I. And as we've been having this conversation, I've been thinking, well, how does God speak into each moment, each of these epics? And I'm gonna hold a very large metaphor for God. Whether or not you call God the numinous, the deeper consciousness, or the more or an energy, a vibration, a cosmic ecology, whatever it is, it seems that each of these epochs pulls us down into some kind of recognition of them all. And I think that each of these. These moments and times and different experiences have tucked, as it were, a kind of a secret of the sacred. All cultures, all times, all humans tuck within their kind of mystery and their esoteric, a secret of the sacred. And so when we think about, you know, it's very easy to default to this idea of spiral dynamics or stage theory as sort of a stage evolution. But I think, you know, the final stage might be just pulling out all that, all of our experiences, living with the complexities, the paradox, and asking at the same time, who are we as humans as we're dealing with, A, the pull towards the more, and B, the practical effect of living with difference and diversity of experience. So, like, I feel really excited about anything that raises our consciousness to whatever state that we're currently in. I think that, you know, bring it all together. It's a matter of spiritual artistry to allow all of the parts that are spread across generations just to rest in us and let them sing whatever, however that song sounds.

John Dehlin [01:09:36] I love it. You got all God on us, Gina.

Gina Colvin [01:09:38] I did.

Jamie Hanis-Handy [01:09:39] Yay.

John Dehlin [01:09:39] I love it. And if we're. If we're striving to be yellow or turquoise, then we're going to embrace it. We're going to embrace it all.

Glenn Ostlund [01:09:49] And you can't hide your light under a bushel like yellows tend to do. Yellows just want to hide under a bushel. You can't do that.

John Dehlin [01:09:56] Can't do that. Not anymore. All right, Jamie. Hannah's handy. Lindsay Hanson Park. Dr. Gina Colvin. Glenn Osland. I love you all. I'm proud to be associated with you. And I'm very honored you would all join us on Mormon Stories. Thanks for coming on. Thank you or all our listeners. Thanks for joining us today. We've loved having you. Hope you've gotten some value out of this. We sure appreciated it and appreciate all the comments and people who joined us live. Please join us again on Mormon Stories. Other times. Email us@mormonstoriesmail.com if you have questions or feedback. Support the Open Stories foundation and Mormon Stories with you can with your monthly donations. That keeps us alive and allows us to provide you with content like this. Check out our events page@mormonstories.org events because we've got workshops and retreats coming up. We've got an event with Carolyn Pearson. We've got an event with Tova Mirvas. We've got retreats and workshops coming up in the months ahead. Get ready for Sunstone, it's coming in July and lots of Sunstone regional events along the way. And please, please stay tuned for more Goodness on Mormon Stories, a thoughtful Faith, Mormon Matters, Year of Polygamy, Infants on Thrones and all the different podcasts out there. Take care everybody and we'll talk soon. Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org thank you very much.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.